Things 2, 3, 4...well you get the picture

I suppose a more rigid mind would expect (nay demand) that each thing in 2 - 5 have its own blog post. However I decided to apply my ability to synthesize information (Bloom's Taxonomy! Holla at ya boy!) and combine them into one epic post. In essence I don't think this is unreasonable as all three deal with the overarching concept of using blogs in education and feeding them through RSS Feeds into reader applications. Many things in this class will be new and foreign to me and thus cause me to curl up into the fetal position murmuring quietly to myself (which I normally do 3-4 times a day anyway). But in this case we have hit an application that I have been using for a long while so this should simply be an overview of what I already do.

I love blogs. I don't necessarily love blogging, but I love reading blogs. I subscribe to about 80 blogs on my google reader account organized in various categories. Here's a screenshot I took this morning of my account so you can see how they are organized.


I have my blogs organized into 9 discrete categories. I do subscribe to several blogs in the educational and educational psychology realm. Which can be seen below.




Among the sites I read regularly are Edutopia, Curriculum Matters, the SPED law blog, the flypaper (the in-house blog of the educational think tank the Fordham Foundation), and several blogs pertaining to psychological assessment. All of them are occasionally interesting, often brilliant, but most of time pure grade A filler with little utility. The beauty of Google Reader (and it is of course not the only application that will do this) is how easily and quickly it lets you filter through to find the wheat among the chaff.

I will say I have found precious few blogs that really fit my needs, and I certainly have looked. Their are any number of hundreds of blogs dealing with teaching, instructional strategies, and other global education topics. This is both appropriate and heartening. But I have struggled to find blogs that deal with my particular intersection of interests and skills, that being assessment, educational policy, educational research, and statistical analysis. Given that their appears to be a vacuum I may have to take my web 2.0 skills and simply fill that void myself with the ultimate testing/stats/research/education blog. After all, with those topics their must be literally TENS of people yearning to read that. Of course blogging is by nature a bit narcissistic (not that there is anything wrong with that) so perhaps that isn't a problem. So I'll leave you with the axiom of the day.

Blogging: Giving outlet to the voices in your head 24/7